Last night we had the fantastic opportunity to see We’re Gonna Die by Young Jean Lee at the Oberon Theater in Cambridge, MA. What a show! Actress Obehi Janice captivated the audience with her engaging, heartfelt storytelling, and the musical acts were tremendous too.

WUTD Founder and Executive Director Nina Thompson will participate in the post-show chat following the Sunday (4/24) matinee. Along with Dr. Robert Riethmiller of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, Nina will discuss how people might approach difficult conversations through humor and shared experience.

If you can’t attend the chat, here are three stories from our archive that blend humor with the gravity of this shared human experience:

A Knitting Story – A new chaplain tries to find a way to connect with a woman who is dying….and is able to laugh at her approach.

First Call – Another chaplain story – it’s his first night on call and it’s a doozy, and this guy is funny!

Go to the Light – This one gets the audience laughing, and connecting with each other, every time. We won’t tell you more than that…

Death is unimaginable. That’s the problem. If I try to conjure up no-me-ness, it’s impossible, because in death the “I” who imagines will be absent. So, what I wish for is a trial run, just to get a sense of death’s texture. If human life were sensibly arranged we would each get a test drive, before we had to do the real thing. But no, that’s exactly what isn’t possible. Life is unfair, said John F. Kennedy. But at least in many lives there is room for experimentation, failure, choosing again. Death, your own death has none of that. That’s what I call really unfair.

If we’re incapable of accurately fantasizing an experience of not- experiencing, the question then becomes where do we have room for experimentation, learning, and choice. That place is around the fear of death — what it is, how to ease it.

This is what has helped me: Spending time with a dying friend. His name was David Palmer. He was my first close friend to be taken by a terminal illness. And taken is exactly how it felt: he didn’t want to go, we didn’t want him to leave.

But Death pulled into the station of David’s life- which in this case was the house one hundred feet from mine, a house he built with his partner of forty-plus years, Jean Lathrop. Then, slowly over nineteen months, warning us every so often, then more and more frequently, with trips to emergency services – Death finally took him away. Volition didn’t count. Resistance was impossible.

Sometimes when David was too weak to get out of bed I would take a nap on the couch next to him. Sometimes I’d just sit in the room. There were other friends who helped more than I did – bathed or lifted him, but I ran some errands, cooked some meals. Sat with him. That was the biggest thing for me – just sitting at his bedside. I began to understand that it was a gift to be part of his dying. Even though it was a gift from the thirteenth fairy, the last gift he or Jean or I or any of our friends ever wanted.

“You’re a pioneer in this David,” I said once, knowing he would get the humor in it and the irony. “You’re teaching us how to do it.”

And he did. First, he stopped worrying about problems he could no longer fix – a leaky roof, trouble at his former business. And asked us not to talk to him about these things. Then he became, in that bed, very loving and open. I don’t know how this came about. Perhaps it was the nature of the situation – but this doesn’t happen to everyone in the process of dying. Suddenly I could kiss him once a day; whenever I left I could say I love you. There were outbursts of affection that would never have happened in an ordinary time. Finally, he really did become accepting and a tiny bit radiant. Then he was gone.

He died well, as much as one can perform well at something so unwelcome.

For myself, for the first time the severity and the inevitability of death seeped into my bones and heart. A little late, I’m almost seventy, but there it is. (Believe me, I know that I am both privileged and perhaps cursed to be one of the few humans who has been a stranger to death. But what can I do? I was born into good health, in modern times in a prosperous nation.)

I witnessed for myself how death cannot be resisted, so my fear of it began to ease. Death takes you. This felt like a relief. I don’t have to do anything about it. As Emily Dickinson says, “Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.”

What has changed? Now, sometimes, I intentionally notice and say sentences to myself like: This is the only time you’ll be walking down this driveway, on this particular day, Michele. Or: This is the only time you’ll be peeling this particular carrot. So that a preciousness arises- really just a moment – less than one second – passes through me, sometimes more than once a day, maybe three or five times in a day. Even when I’m grouchy I am able to sometimes think: Oh how lovely to be grouchy and not dead.

The moral of my story is the closer you involve yourself with the dying (I’m talking about daily American life here, not the life that Syrian refugee families or the children and adults in Iraq have known, a life with much too much death), the less you are fearful, the more you experience gratitude and appreciation in the present. The more you touch gratitude and appreciation the less you fear that big, gigantic, humongous loss which is your own mortality.

Maybe there are more gifts than these. I will tell you if I find them.

Michele Clark lives in Plainfield Vermont at the New Hamburger Community, an intentional community, where the events in this essay occurred. She is a a mental health counselor in private practice Montpelier and teaches half-time in the MA in Psychology and Counseling at Goddard College where she blogs as The Mediocre Meditator.

The Wake Up to Dying Project will be featured on WGDR this Friday at 9:00 AM, on The Magical Mystery Tour with Tonio Epstein. First off will be a 1/2 hour program called Mortality Tales, featuring Timothy Kasten of Middlesex, Vermont.

After that, Tonio will interview Executive Director Nina Thompson about The Wake Up to Dying Project, and open the show to your questions and stories. In central Vermont, you can listen to WGDR at 91.1 or 91.7. And you can always listen to the live stream at wgdr.org.

For your questions and stories during the show, call this number: 802-454-7762